What has
made, and what now makes, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche(1844-1900) so
important, is that he recognized with great force, clarity and impressive
foresight the most troubling and persistent problem of modernity: the problem
of values. His writings, though, at least for millions in
the last century or more, lack a simplicity for readers. For millions of others, of course, they know
nothing of Nietzsche and, like so many things in our knowledge explosion, they
will not miss what they don’t know.

As a
student and teacher, a lecturer and adult educator with an interest in
philosophy over more than half a century, 1963-2015, first in the classroom and
lecture-hall, and then in cyberspace, I have found that Nietzsche’s writings
have kept both me, my students, and my many contacts in cyberspace, busy
unraveling what is often the obscure and enigmatic literary idiom of this 19th
century philosopher. Nietzsche uncovered
many of the depths and complexities of value-issues, and these value-issues
have defeated generations of the best efforts of philosophers and social
scientists to articulate for modern man, a basis for both the individual and
community rooted in a coherent set of relevant values.

Part
1.1:

Nietzsche
saw modern man’s values as an incoherent pastiche of bits and pieces from a
hundred sources. He called this collection of values that most people possess “a multi-colored cow”. The smorgasbord of faiths and value systems on
offer in the West today wonderfully illustrates what Nietzsche foresaw: values
as mix-and-match consumer goods, a type of marketplace for the consumer
society. The mix on offer, however
ingenious it often is in the internet marketplace, is an absurd collection of
stuff, and the results are pitifully anaemic for a mass society in search of a
central survival core, in search of a map for the human journey ahead.

Just how
and where human beings are to find the set of values on which to base a life of
meaning and coherence is still an enigma, a dilemma. In some ways our global
society is a victim of over-choice. We
have so much information, at least those with WWW access, but what is the big-picture in which we are
to place this plethora of wisdoms, this vast soup of knowledge. Vague
sentiments of good will, however genuine, are not enough. Some explicit
agreement on principles is required for any co-ordinated progress. And
principles are often ify-things.

Part 2:

Nietzsche’s
dilemma is our dilemma. His analysis of our modern situation has become an
explicit dilemma, a conundrum, for modern humanity, just as he predicted.
Nietzsche is the author of the expression God Is Dead. What he meant by these
words is that Western culture no longer places God at the centre of things. The
death of God has knocked the pins out from under Western value systems, and
revealed an abyss below. The values we have continued to live by, that we have
put in the place of tradition, in the place of those values that have lost their
meaning, result in our being cast adrift, whether we realize it or not. The
question is, what do we do now?

Since
1900 we have done many things in our state of being cast adrift. One thing we
have done, that western society has put in the place of that tradition, can be
seen in the expression: be yourself.1
It is an absurd dream of contemporary
culture that people, just by being themselves, can try to live according to
what Nietzsche calls their own values. The values people choose are usually not
their own values: they are bits and pieces picked up in the bazaar of
modernity, and they usually have no idea where these values come from and, even
when they do, the package is pastiche and panorama, a panoply of pluralism.

Nothing
is more obvious to Nietzsche than the fact that people don’t generally know how
to create values. Due to this fact, they
fall back on tradition. Fundamentalism in all its forms afflicts a beleaguered
humanity. There have been many values and meaning systems in the last century
or more that have had great power to move great numbers of people. Modern 20th and 21st century
history is littered with the results of these values. To Nietzsche, values have
power and they spring from power: like works of art, their greatness is in
their power to move us. The plethora of schools of philosophy and art,
literature and culture, music and medicine, are a testimony to some of these
powerful systems of ideas.

Part 3:

There is
nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. The world has long been
struggling with enormous new social and material forces. The context for this
struggle increasingly is pointing toward the necessity of unity in diversity or
the world will tear itself apart in its attachment to sectarian, political,
nationalistic, and racial loyalties of the past. This it is doing with greater
and greater efficiency.

The
values of materialism are built on the enormous power of science. I take a deep
satisfaction and personal meaning in the advances that society has made in the
last century or more, and particularly from the processes that have knit
together the earth’s peoples and nations through science and technology. But
humanity yearns desperately, and it has all my life, for its Soul, for the God
that Nietzsche said so presciently had died.

Part 3.1:

I was born in July 1944, in the midst of a war that
saw the death of some 60 million people. I came to believe, by the 1960s, that the one
Power which could fulfill the ultimate longing of the peoples of the world for
peace and unity, was to find God again. But in our pluralistic secular and
sacred world individuals and societies had gradually come to find many gods. The
print and electronic media presented modern man with a cornucopia of values and
beliefs, gods and ultimate meaning systems.

Nietzsche saw the media as a manipulator of popular
sentiment and as possessing the power to create all sorts of values and meanings.
The result, at least for that 19th century philosopher, was that
almost everybody merely became a member
of the herd or the proponent of an individualism that got in the way of any
genuine sense of community and, more importantly, a community of communities. -Ron
Price with thanks to 1Eric Walther, Nietzsche, Our Contemporary, Philosophy Now, November/December 2012. Eric Walther taught philosophy from 1967, and
computer science from 1983, at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University;
he retired in 2003. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Yale University, and an
MS in Computer Science from Polytechnic University.

Part 4:

As I was
studying history

&
philosophy in the fall

of ’63
& ‘64, the counter-

culture
began to be felt in

my North
American home

in both
the USA & Canada,1

&
quite visibly at Berkeley

with
what was then called

the
free-speech movement.2

I got
caught-up in this student

movement
& got my picture on

the
front-page of the newspaper.3

But I
could not be identified with

the
counter-culture because of my

religion
which was the main source

of my
worldview, my physical and

social
reality; namely, that the world

was but
one country, and humankind,

mankind,
were its world citizens,4 and

that
without a centre mere anarchy was

to be
loosed upon the world, and that blood-

dimmed
tide. Everywhere, too, the ceremony

of
innocence is and would be drowned. And

the
best lacked all conviction, while the worst

were
and still are full of passionate intensity.5

1 The term
counterculture is attributed to professor emeritus of
history at California Theodore Roszak(1903-2011), author of The Making of a Counter Culture. The term became prominent in the news media
amid the social revolution that swept North and South America, Western Europe,
Japan, Australia, and New Zealand during the 1960s and early 1970s. In North
America the counterculture of the 1960s became identified with the rejection of
conventional social norms of the 1950s.

3 The
Civil Rights Act of July 1964 prohibited racial discrimination in employment
and education. It outlawed racial segregation in public facilities. In the summer of 1964, over forty Freedom Schools opened in
Mississippi. These schools were part of Freedom Summer, a project of the
Southern Civil Rights Movement, with the goal to empower African Americans in
Mississippi to become active citizens and agents of social change.

In the late summer and early autumn of 1964 and into the first
months of 1965 I was associated with the Student Non-violent
Co-ordinating Committee which, at the time, had a philosophy of nonviolence. But after the mid-1960s that philosophy
migrated to one of greater militancy. In
October of 1964 Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and, by
the end of the spring semester in April 1965, I had ceased my participation in
that movement.

4 As a
student of sociology both at university as a student, after university as a
teacher, and on retirement, I came to read: Toqueville, Nisbet, Durkheim, Bell,
and many other social theorists. They each and all reinforced the views I had
begun university with as a Baha’i. See Robert Nisbet, Dogma and Democracy, The Sociological Tradition,
Heinemann, London, 1966, pp. 232-237.

5 W.B.
Yeats, The Second Coming.

Ron
Price

4/11/’12
to 19/6/’15.

COUNTER-CULTURE

Part 1:

A counterculture movement expresses the
ethos and aspirations of a specific population during a well-defined era. When
oppositional forces reachcritical
mass countercultures
can trigger dramatic cultural changes. Prominent examples of countercultures inEuropeand North AmericaincludeRomanticism(1790–1840), Bohemianism(1850–1910), the more fragmentary
counterculture of theBeat Generation(1944–1964) and perhaps, most
prominently, thecounterculture
of the 1960s(1964–1974), usually associated with the
hippiesubculture.

My life from 1964 to 1974 straddled the
edges of the counter-culture but never fully identified with it. By the 1970s I had left Canada and my years at
university when I had got as close as I ever would to the many sources and
influences of the counter-culture. In
1971 I was in Australia where the
“Rainbow Region” of northern NSW was the focus of Australia’s counterculture.
Its capital was Nimbin. There were the 1971 and 1973 Aquarius Festivals in
Nimbin.

Part 1.1:

In May 2013 a two-day conference titled
“Aquarius and Beyond: 40 years on…” was held at Southern Cross University(SCU).
SCU is a
research intensive Australian publicuniversity with some 15,000
internal and external students. This conference marked the 40th anniversary
of the Festival which was one of, if notthe, defining countercultural event in Australia.

In 1971 I had just arrived in Australia and was a teacher in
Whyalla South Australia. In 1972, as
Australia was moving to the height of the counter-culture movement, I was the
secretary of the local Baha’i community of Whyalla and its 30 Baha’is, mostly
youth.

Part 2:

The termcountercultureis attributed toTheodore
Roszakauthor ofThe Making of a Counter Culture.I do not want to confine my exploration of the counterculture to
that period, nor do I want to leave the concept far behind in that epi-centre
of Nimbin in the early 1970s. I aminterested
in the specific structure of feeling that is now generally associated with the
term, counter-culture.

1D.T. Miller and M. Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were, Doubleday and Co., NY, 1977.

Ron Price

19/6/’15.

1 Theodore
Rozak, “When
the counterculture counted,” in SFGate,

December 23, 2001

Ron Price

19/6/’15.

YET MORE ON THE COUNTER-CULTURE

Part
1:

By
1968, having spent the 1960s seeking an alternative to what C. Wright Mills
called an elite military-industrial complex, a center to what Daniel Bell
called “the exhaustion of the political ideas of the fifties”, to what I saw as
the emerging crisis of modern capitalist society, to the irrelevance of the
dominant political and religious institutions, I found myself living on Baffin
Island and working among the Inuit. I
was one of those “restless youth” described below.

I
also found myself, for at least six months of 1968, in mental hospitals dealing
with my own personal psychiatric crisis. The year 1968 was an eventful one:
Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, and many people of fame
and prominence in society died: Dorothy Gish, Helen Keller, Charlie Chaplin,
John Steinbeck, inter alia.

Part
2:

The
search for “authenticity” against established habits of power spread with astonishing
speed across societies in the mid-to-late ‘60s. The U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency was overwhelmed in late 1968 to find that countercultural activities
were evident and politically disruptive on every continent. The CIA’s report to
the president on “Restless Youth” described a “world-wide phenomenon” that had
undermined allies such as West Germany, Japan, and South Korea.

Dissent
was also causing internal conflict in the so-called “Communist Bloc” especially
Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, and the Soviet Union; as well as disorder in
“third world” societies: Argentina,
Chile, Egypt, and Tunisia, among others).1 Prior moments of revolution had had an international
quality, but the simultaneity of countercultural activities in so many
societies in 1968 made that year seem unprecedented in promise and peril for
those living through it.2

2
On this point, see Mark Kurlansky, “1968: The Year That Rocked the World,” New
York, 2004 in The American Historical
Review, “The Rise and Fall of an International Counterculture, 1960–1975,” Jeremi
Suri, February 2009.

Part
3:

There
was a revolt against authority

back
then as my adolescence turned

into
adulthood; the 1960s advanced

from
year to year, as civil rights, as

feminism,
as the Cold War turned to

the
counter-culture, as the old-politics

and
religion became irrelevant…and I

turned
to what I thought then, & what

I
think now, was & is a very real option,

choice,
alternative, to born-again values,

a
dominant secular humanism that was

really
materialism, & a basis for law and

order
in an emerging pluralist society when

all
the olds isms were wasms, & my simple

world
of the ‘50s & ‘60s was going crazier

and
crazier. Things were falling apart; the centre

had
not held; mere anarchy was slowly being loosed

upon the
world; the blood-dimmed tide was also and

slowly
spreading everywhere, the best I knew lacked

all
conviction, while the worst were full of passionate

intensity
and that rough beast had finally been born.1

1 W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Ron
Price

21/6/’15.

Edited by RonPrice - 21-Jun-2015 at 06:55

Ron Price has been married for 47 years(in 2014) and a teacher for 35. He has been a writer and editor for 15, and a Baha'i for 55(in 2014).

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